Google CEO says company tends to create enemies

3 Min Read

* CEO says disruption caused by Google creates enemies

* Google Apps adding about 3,000 business per day

By Alexei Oreskovic

SAN FRANCISCO, April 12 (Reuters) - Google Inc’s chief executive Eric Schmidt said the company’s “disruptive” business created enemies for world’s No.1 search engine, and he said that governments were keeping a close watch on the firm.

“Every government sort of has some group that’s busy trying to figure out what we’re up to. Because information is power,” Google (GOOG.O) CEO Schmidt said at an event at the company’s headquarters on Tuesday in response to a question about Google’s weakness and challenges.

“We’re quite disruptive, and in the course of that disruption we tend to create enemies, which are hopefully not intended on our part,” Schmidt said.

Google has increasingly clashed with regulators and other technology companies.

Last month, the Internet search giant relocated its search site from mainland China to Hong Kong, in response to censorship in China and a cyberattack that it said originated in China.

Google has also come under the scrutiny of the United States Federal Trade Commission which is looking into the competitive impact of the company’s plan to acquire mobile advertising company AdMob for $750 million.

And Apple Inc (AAPL.O), once a Google ally, recently announced its own plan to compete with Google in the mobile advertising market.

Schmidt’s comments were made at the end of an all-day event at Google’s Mountain View, California headquarters on Monday at which the company hosted about 400 information technology managers and pushed for the adoption of Internet-based software at their organizations.

He said Google has a couple of million enterprise customers for the Google Apps software suite and was adding about 3,000 business per day.

At the event, Google also unveiled new versions of its Docs package of online productivity software, adding improvements such as the ability to view changes that other users make to a document in real time.

The event comes as Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O), which dominates the market for productivity software, is expected to roll-out a new version of its Office products with web-based features by June.

Google sells companies an enterprise-grade version of its online applications, including Gmail and word processing, for $50 a year per user.

Google’s Apps business — which the company has said is profitable and generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue a year — is a tiny portion of Google’s overall business, which yielded almost $24 billion in revenue last year. (Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Valerie Lee)